


Mail Call

by jenna_thorn



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-20
Updated: 2007-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-05 12:16:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mail call on Atlantis</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mail Call

At basic, mail call was cause for celebration. There was the guy who got a letter every week from his mother, or his aunt, or his sister. There was the asshole who had three different girls writing him, each pledging eternal love and a lifetime supply of backseat groping. There was always some soft touch whose little sister wrote and put cartoon stickers on the back, giving them all an extra fifty pushups that day. But everyone, even the schmoes who walked away with nothing for six weeks in a row, knew that mail call was the day that a window opened to off-base, where little brothers played baseball and had spelling tests, where every girl was pretty and every dinner table sported an apple pie. Even, or maybe especially, the ones that didn't.

But in another galaxy, much too far from Iowa, mail call brought coffee, penicillin, and uniforms that weren't held together with leather thongs. He'd watched his grandmother put hundreds of tiny stitches in precise lines across quilts over years. As much as he may have wished for her nimble fingers, he'd rather have thorny semi-sentient vines dragged across the rest of his body than let her see him like this, in pants as tight as the football uniform she was once so scandalized by. At least on varsity, he'd had a cup to hide behind.

\---:::---

Lorne leaned into Sheppard's office, "_Apollo's_ unloading, sir."

Sheppard spun a grimy haversack through the air at him without looking up. Lorne caught it easily and pulled a silvery box out of it. He waved the box in inquiry and dropped the bag against the wall. "I've had all of McKay I can handle today," Sheppard said by way of explanation, "Would you drop that off in his lab on your way…"he looked up to hand Lorne a clipboard, and made a double-take worthy of Huckleberry Hound. "Whoa, Major, I didn't know ballet tights came with pockets."

"Requisition didn't anticipate the vines on MX4 23K and we've had to reallocate some uniforms."

"Requisition screwed up, huh? Whose fault is that?"

"Yours, sir," Lorne replied with an absolutely straight face, tucking the clipboard under his arm.

"What?" Sheppard let all four feet of his chair hit the floor.

"You sign the forms and as far as Command is concerned, you do all of your own paperwork, too."

"You'd think they'd be able to tell the difference between your handwriting and mine by now."

"Have they ever seen yours, sir?"

Sheppard fell silent and Lorne wondered for a moment if he'd stepped over the line. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

"I see absolutely nothing wrong with those pants, Major. Carry on."

Lorne grinned as he left, clipboard in one hand, casually tossing the silver bundle in the air with the other.

\---:::---

Of the cluster of folks picking up packages from the _Apollo_ unload, the ones who'd been part of the "workforce sharing" on MX4 23K were obvious. Half the science contingent had staples holding shut the gaping holes in their clothing. At least they could bend over.

Lorne walked up behind Parrish, whose bandaged knees shone gauzey white through the gaping holes in his trousers. "So much for rip stop nylon, eh?" Lorne joked.

Parrish grinned back, "Can't complain. They held up better than my skin did." He glanced down, then snapped his eyes back up.

"Don't start." Lorne warned.

"What'd you do, wash 'em on hot?" Parrish teased.

"This time two weeks ago, I had six pair that fit. One went to the rhino planet…" Parrish winced and Lorne continued, "one became field dressing and came back mostly on Adams, I tossed one after the septic system backwashed, and the docs got enthusiastic about cutting me out of the ones I was wearing when the tree fell on me. And the ones I was wearing when the triffids attacked aren't modest."

"I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the ones you are wearing aren't modest either. I'm a botanist, but I can count to six, so where's the last?"

"Gave 'em to Smitty, and they fit him about as well as Leander's fit me."

"Oh. Uh Oh." They both looked forward to where Smitty stood, head and shoulders above the milling crowd.

"Yeah." If he'd been three inches taller, he could have justified keeping that pair for himself. That'll teach him to be self-sacrificing. He patted people on the shoulder with the clipboard, and they gave way. "Hey Smitty." The running joke was that Smitty had been assigned the supply shift because he didn't need the forklift for anything but the heaviest shipments. In a science-blue tee stretched to a whimper and Lorne's pants, he made Ronon, behind him with a metal case over one shoulder, seem petite.

Smitty looked up from the manifest and asked, "You the Major or the Lt. Colonel right now?" Lorne waggled the clipboard in answer and got a parcel bag of official files in return.

"Just tell me that the uniforms came in."

"In, unpacked, and ready for pickup." Smitty grinned as he signed the receipt and handed the clipboard back to Lorne.

"Good. I'd like to sit down without castrating myself at some point today."

"You want your mail, too, or you comin' back?"

"Real or official?"

"Bit of both."

Lorne couldn't help grinning and he juggled to gather another locked bag and two smaller envelopes.

"Nice package."

"Oh, no, not you too."

"What? Oh..." Smitty snorted, "No, I meant the package. That one."

Lorne tucked the clipboard into the courier flap under his own mail and straightened McKay's silver widget on top of the stack. "Oh, that? I forgot I even had that. I'm headed to McKay's lair. You got anything for him that doesn't need an autograph?"

"Nothin' you got hands for, and there's no room in your pockets for anything but you."

 

\---:::---

Lorne hesitated in the corridor, listening. Recon was as important out of the field as in it, but the courier bag with Sheppard's paperwork was heavy and he was now in hour five of a rip-stop wedgie.

He ducked around the corner to see Zelenka, arms crossed, waiting for McKay to wind down from whatever he was hollering about this time. Half the geeks in the lab were studiously ignoring them, and the other half were shamelessly eavesdropping, though Lorne could only catch one word in three. Lorne slid the stack of packages onto a table and stood tossing the widget like a baseball from hand to hand, until McKay turned to him and snarled, "Is that from Sheppard?" without changing his tone or even taking a breath. Lorne nodded. McKay grunted, "Well, hand it over. No one's had a chance to look at it since he found it," and Lorne tossed it into the air at him.

He realized his mistake almost immediately. McKay caught it with exaggerated care and started in with "just because you over-aged jocks can't handle items in a careful or civilized manner doesn't mean that the rest of us feel like playing 'Bounce the Ball' with potentially dangerous objects." He glanced down at it and handed it, one hand over and one hand under, to Zelenka, who rolled his eyes and took it with one hand.

A light flashed, and McKay started yelling again.

\---:::---

 

Basic training only lasted a few weeks, percentage-wise a short section of a soldier's life, and yet, many of the lessons learned there lasted a lifetime: an appreciation for home cooking, the importance of shaving whenever you had a chance, the delight of mail call, and a mellowing of the normal rules of modesty.

He stood in Sheppard's office again, the courier bag on the desk between them.

"Because Radek didn't have the gene, it was activated?"

"Apparently so, sir."

"Rodney have any idea why it had that particular effect?"

"He was expressing several hypotheses as I left, sir. My own hypothesis," which was that the Ancients were perverts or had a drill sergeant's idea of practical jokes, "seems unlikely."

"It does seem that a clothing removal beam wouldn't be particularly helpful in a war against the Wraith."

"Dr. Zelenka surmised that it was intended to remove organic based items without disrupting actual living tissue. It only activated when touched by someone without the gene."

"Well, no harm done, I suppose."

"I'm not sure I would say that." Lorne thought of the look on Radek's face in between his feeling an unexpected breeze and grabbing the courier envelope off the table to use as a military issue figleaf, of the walk between the lab and his own quarters wearing nothing but a lab coat, knowing that Chuck was already counting his profits for copies of the lab surveillance tape, of the names that the widget would be called - the Flasher Cube, the Nudity Beam, the Exposer.

"C'mon, Major. It's not like you turned into a bug, or got possessed by a ghost and played killer hide-and-seek with the expedition leader, or …"

"I owe Leander a pair of pants, sir."

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "package" challenge at LJ's community Adventures_in.


End file.
